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Coronavirus Vital Knowledge

Dealing With Overwhelm: When Doing Nothing is Super Productive

I’ve been sitting at home with a lot of FOMO while scrolling through my IG feed. I’m a super productive person. Like, my superpower is not sleeping. I have about five extra hours in my day just from not sleeping and missing meals.

So when I’m sitting around envious of what others are “accomplishing” during their quarantine I know that something is seriously off with me. That’s when I realized that not only am I being bombarded on social media (looking at you IG!) by DOING DOING DOING!!! But also that I was just on red alert amounts of stress that had my brain spinning its wheel unable to focus on tasks. (hi, this paragraph took me ten minutes to write.)

When this happens I throw it out to the Skinfessional community (I recommend you all do the same!) to see if I’m all alone. I wasn’t and I didn’t feel as bad being all messed up in a group was WAY better than being messed up alone… I discovered that lots of people were having the same sense of fear and overwhelm I was. Who would have thunk it?

How quarantine is triggering you. Give yourself space and love.

Doing Nothing is Hard

That’s when I decided that I needed to get proactive about doing nothing, but it proved harder than expected because I felt all this peer pressure to be doing. To combat this, schedule even more time away from social media and away from the tech of my life. I could read, watch tv, cook, hang with my cats, exercise, anything that didn’t require me to be online. But nothing else.

I already schedule an hour as soon as I wake up to be offline and one at night, but I needed more. If you’ve listened to other episodes we talk about this (here and here). I’m not tied to my phone or tech but this was surprisingly hard to do for more time! Exercise classes are online. Recipes – online. And as soon as I would get online I wanted to check on what everyone else was doing and since I wasn’t in my studio I became obsessed with how my peers were holding up and what they were up to in a way I hadn’t since Yelp was brand spanking new. It was a vicious cycle! The only way out was to just cut myself 100% off for longer stretches.

It was like a diet of the mind with an hourly caloric intake of triggering media. Slowly I realized that I didn’t need to DO as much. I could settle down and be okay with relaxing, and this let me open myself up to doing again.

Do You Already Have Stuff?

If you feel like you are in a place to DO take a look at what you already have sitting around. I know I had a bunch of half finished courses, updated classes that I needed to take again, and stuff I had kinda half-assed when I took them the first time. Alex and I dig deep about all this, but if you come away from reading this and never listen I want to make sure you know that before you start investing in the new and shiny and get all overwhelmed, be sure to look at what was once new and shiny. It might be just what you need. Also, remember the point of this episode. Doing nothing might be the most productive thing for you right now!